X-Message-Number: 1763
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 93 15:35:38 CST
From:  (Micheal B. O'Neal)
Subject: CRYONICS -- CSC opening session

I returned late last night from CSC -- the Computer Science Conference.
This conference is the primary gathering held each year by the ACM
(Association for Computing Machinery).  As many of you are probably 
aware, the ACM is the major professional organization for computer 
science researchers and educators.

This year the theme of the conference was "IF" and the featured speaker
at the opening session was Raymond Kurzweil.  Dr. Kurzweil is most famous
for the "Kurzweil reader", machines that can read books to the blind.

His talk concerned the consequences of Moore's Law over the next half 
century.   Moore's Law states that computing speeds and memory densities 
double approximately every two years.  Kurzweil pointed out that this 
"law" has held since the first electromechanical computers of the early 
1940's (actually, he claimed it goes back further to the Hollerith 
tabulating machines used early in this century).  He also mentioned that 
a similar law appears to hold for the resolution of biological scanning 
technologies such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging).

What does Kurzweil see as the results of this exponential curve?   

Within 10 years computers will be able to handle speech and vision.  
Natural language translation will become a reality.  Books will begin 
to pass into obsolescence (though he did point out that obsolescence 
is often a significant fraction of a product's life cycle, so books 
will still remain in wide use for some time.)  

In 20 years computers will match the human brain in terms of computations
per second.  It will take almost 30 years to achieve the memory capacity
of the human brain.  

But, how will these things be programmed?  That is where the talk got 
interesting from an immortalist point of view.  The approach he offered
was to scan the human brain and create the same connections within the
machine.  At first this would only be done with certain segments of the
brain, such as the visual cortex, and in a crude manner.  But as the
technologies of scanning and computing improve we will be able to 
produce better copies of larger systems.  

Kurzweil predicted that around 2020 we should be able to copy the mind
of a "recently dead" human to a computer.  (Yes, he actually used the 
phrase "recently dead")  He mentioned that scanning a non-living human
should be easier than scanning a living human, but did not elaborate.
(I assume that the primary reason is that we don't have to worry about
the scanning process being damaging to the original.)  He then touched 
on some of the ethical problems (e.g., will the copy be the "same" person).

Kurzweil also mentioned other fascinating ideas like fabricating 
artificial bodies for these computer minds.  He predicted that by 2040 
common computers would be able to simulate thousands of individuals, 
each with thousands of times the capacity of the human mind.

Heady stuff for a mainstream conference of computer scientists and 
educators.

I found two things particularly astonishing about this presentation.  
First, here was a respected scientist speaking to the members of a 
major scientific and educational society about the possibility of 
uploading (although he never used that word) -- and presenting it 
in a positive light.  The second thing that surprised me was the 
time line he presented.  I consider myself a wide eyed optimist and 
agree wholeheartedly with most of what Kurzweil said.  But even in my 
most optimistic moments, I would never have pegged uploading to occur 
within the next 100, not to mention, 30 years.  

Yet when considered in the light of Moore's Law, Kurzweil's time line 
seems perfectly reasonable.  I was obviously not the only person caught 
up in his vision.  His talk was the topic of conversation all day.
And the immortalist message obviously got through (at least to some).
For example, while waiting for an elevator later in the day, a conference
attendee asked if I had attended the morning session.  When I responded
affirmatively, he enthusiastically commented something to the effect of
"Well, if we can make it to 2020 we'll last forever."  The man was not
joking.

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